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Another Indigo Telephoto
28 July 2025
We prefer shooting telephoto because that's how we look at the world. Wide angle introduces a distortion we can't countenance. And normal focal lengths merely catalog all the things we tend to ignore.
Farallons at Evening. iPhone 15 Pro Max 5x back camera at f2.8, 1/1481 seconds and ISO 32. Captured in the Adobe Indigo camera app and processed in Adobe Camera Raw.
But telephoto lets us hone in on the thing that captures our imagination. The only disappointment is too much telephoto makes hand-holding impossible. The subject jumps around erratically in the view finder.
And we have to hand hold. Because this sort of capture is spontaneous. There's no question of setting up a tripod. So image stabilization is mandatory.
This view is one we have seen many times over the years living here and taking a walk in the neighborhood. Still, it's rare to get such a clear view of the Farallons. And even then, we've never had a camera-lens combo that could frame it quite like we see it in our mind.
Compare our best effort from 2020 with a Nikon D200 an 86mm Nikkor.
But, if you remember our story about the Ladies of the Roof, you know Adobe's Indigo camera app provides double the telephoto of our iPhone's lens. So instead of capturing the scene at 5x maximum, we can get it at 10x.
It does this, as we explained in the earlier article, by combining multiple exposures that, inevitably, are not quite aligned because of camera shake. Adobe calls it "multi-frame super-resolution." It's an alternative to merely scaling.
And it's very impressive.
For one thing, it's real not interpolated. The data comes from different captures of the actual scene. So detail survives the enlargement without introducing noise, something this low-light capture might encourage.
Could a dSLR do this? Of course it could. Just imagine!